In a recent interview with Fox News’ Laura Ingraham, US President Donald Trump defended visas for skilled workers. “We also need to attract talent,” Trump said. “We have a lot of talented people here,” Ingraham responded. “No, no, no,” Trump responded, prompting Ingraham to insist that there are talented American workers at home. “You don’t have any special talents and people have to learn. You can’t take someone off the unemployment rolls and say, ‘I’m going to put you in a factory and make missiles,'” Trump said.
The American president’s remarks were surprising considering that only in September he signed an executive order raising the H-1B visa application fee for eligible workers to $100,000, compared to the $2,000-5,000 previously paid. The statement sparked criticism and anger in the MAGA world (an abbreviation for Make America Great Again) on social networks, with right-wing activists talking about the president’s “insanity” and predicting further electoral defeats after the defeat in early November. Steve Bannon, a former Trump strategist and figure close to the MAGA movement, said on his War Room podcast: “I think we have enough people until everyone has a high-paying, high-value job.”
Never mind Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent who defended the president’s position by citing industries such as shipbuilding and semiconductors. “Americans can’t get those jobs because in America we haven’t built ships in years, we haven’t made semiconductors, so the idea of bringing in foreign partners, teaching American workers and then going home, it’s a success,” Bessent told Fox News. It doesn’t matter what Bessent says because MAGA isn’t happy and visas for skilled workers, tools then defended by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, are just an argument against the actions of the president they helped re-elect.
Not only among skilled workers but also among foreign students, Trump surprised his base. Having been embroiled in disputes with Ivy League universities and particularly against Harvard, the president gave a surprising answer in the same interview with Igraham that introduced a MAGA favorite topic: China and its growing presence in the United States. “The public is not happy with the idea of hundreds of thousands of foreign students in the United States,” he said. “You said up to 600,000 Chinese students could come to the United States.” Why is it that when so many American kids want to go to school, and these places are not suitable for them, are these universities getting rich with Chinese money?” Trump responded simply by saying he wanted to “get along with the world” and emphasized that the United States has a “very large college and university system.”
Another reason for the dissatisfaction is that the cost of living, the inflation that propelled Trump back to the White House and should be the president’s main concern, does not appear to be a resolved issue. Some of Maga’s supporters say Trump’s push for the cost of living to fall is unreasonable. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a right-wing Republican from Georgia, a former loyalist of the president, now disillusioned with her party and Trump on several issues, disputed the tycoon’s narrative, stating in an interview with CNN that «economic accessibility it’s a problem.” “I go shopping alone,” he said. “Food prices remain high. Energy prices are high. My electric bill is higher here in Washington, DC, at my apartment, and at my home in Rome, Georgia, higher than last year.”
